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To Save or Not to Save: Is the Portland Building Better in Person or the Pictures?

Sixteen years after the city spent $9 million to fix the 1982 postmodernist icon’s sagging 14th and 15th floor, it’s now facing a $95-million top-to-bottom overhaul because virtually every joint in the building is leaking. But as haters of the building call for its demolition and preservationists wail to save it, I’d like to pose a simple question that ought to be asked before spending millions of dollars to save any historic building: is the real thing better than the pictures?
— portlandmonthlymag.com

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12 Comments

Randy Gragg, author of this article, uses Belluschi's Commonwealth Building as a reason to save this colossal PoS. Which is almost as ridiculous as his cry for preservation after saying:

Graves’ original, garland-festooned confection was value-engineered to a graphic study of color and pattern. The interior is a miserable place to work: the tiny windows yield little natural light (Johnson’s Arab-Oil-Embargo-era competition prized energy efficiency which, with the technology of the time, was a building with no windows.) And then there’s the building’s urban design: city officials wanted the main entrance to face the then-new transit mall, but ironically, still wanted parking in the building for themselves—thus, a cavernous garage door faces a city park. As one architecture critic wryly put it: “Where you expect dignity, you get the building's anus.”

This is the kind of building that would make any architect cringe. Flat, cartoony, and from what I hear, a functional nightmare. If you subscribe to the neat timeline of architectural history, this building certainly plays a role, but just because it was a big middle finger to modernism hardly seems like a reason to preserve it. Plus, who really cares about the timeline at this point? I think it's up to Portlandians to decide whether it's become a beloved landmark or not, or whether it's worth fixing or not, but it always was a one liner.

Look at it in this skyline picture. It's adorable! Which is why I think this is one very rare instance where hollowing out the interior - to make a better environment for the humans who work inside - but keeping the facades - all four of them, like an empty gift box, freshly painted and maybe even finally installing the 3-dimensional garland instead of the flat one that resulted from cost cutting - would be a fantastic solution.

The building as executed is pretty awful, and a pale shadow of what Graves designed. If I were king, I'd fix its deficiencies and problems, and I'd hire Graves' office to un-value-engineer it to be everything he originally intended. If you can't do that, then I say tear the thing down if that's what the city wants. It's much more important as an idea, beautifully described in Graves drawings and models.

sameold, you're making a generalization. I said over on the MOMA thread that I'm about to be part of a project to tear down something old, something that locals will likely fret about. But it's not valuable enough to save, frankly. The Portland building is important to architectural history - though as EKE says it's certainly possible that the idea is more important than the execution. On the other hand the Folk Art Museum is far more important as an object than the Portland Building is.

I just like the Portland, a lot, in the skyline and as a material example of how architecture was allowed to become more exuberant, with very mixed results, after the gloomy 1970s.

Not that I liken Graves to Wright, but we bend over backwards (as we probably should) to save FLW houses that have fallen apart due to sometimes-lousy experimental construction.

You can hate the Portland Building, but there's no question that it's one of the few iconic structures exemplifying postmodern historicism around 1980. I know it seems gag-worthy to some, but the PB is to PM what Villa Savoye is to the International Style.

All this points up the divide between design (participated in by a few: architects as a skill) and preservation (participated in by many: larger society as a cultural value). If only buildings that were commonly agreed-upon as well-designed got saved... there'd be precious few. (Maybe that's okay, but that's not what the culture has decided so far.)